Page 4 of 5 WAR OF THE
IMAGINATION, Part 2 The third act in
Iraq By Mark Danner
Congress, what Woodward calls "the
rubber-glove syndrome - the tendency not to leave
his fingerprints on decisions" - can prove useful
in avoiding responsibility for wreckage caused -
for a time, anyway. It cannot, however, prevent
the consequences on the ground and, in Iraq, it
has not.
Nearly four years into the Iraq
war, as we enter the time of
proposed solutions, the
consequences of those early decisions define the
bloody landscape. By dismissing and humiliating
the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi Army, our
leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the
insurgency. By bringing far too few troops to
secure Saddam's enormous arms depots they armed
it. By bringing too few to keep order they
presided over the looting and overwhelming
violence and social disintegration that provided
the insurgency such fertile soil.
By
blithely purging tens of thousands of the
country's Ba'athist elite, whatever their deeds,
and by establishing a muscle-bound and inept
American occupation without an "Iraqi face", they
created an increasing resentment among Iraqis that
fostered the insurgency and encouraged people to
shelter it. And by providing too few troops to
secure Iraq's borders they helped supply its
forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic
extremists from neighboring states. It was the
foreign Islamists' strategy above all to promote
their jihadist cause by provoking a sectarian
civil war in Iraq; by failing to prevent their
attacks and to protect the Shi'ites who became
their targets, the US leaders have allowed them to
succeed.
To Americans now, the hour
appears very late in Iraq. Deeply weary of a war
that early on lost its reason for being, most
Americans want nothing more than to be shown a way
out. The president and his counselors, even in the
weeks before the election, had begun redefining
the idea of victory, dramatically downgrading the
goals that were set out in the National Security
Presidential Directive of August 2002. Thus
Cheney, asked the week before the election about
an "exit strategy" from Iraq, declared that "we're
not looking for an exit strategy. We're looking
for victory", but then went on to offer a rather
modest definition:
Victory will be the day when the
Iraqis solve their political problems and are up
and running with respect to their own
government, and when they're able to provide for
their own security.
This was before
Americans had gone to the polls for mid-term
elections and overwhelmingly condemned the
administration's Iraq policies - with the result
that, as one comedian put it, "on Tuesday night,
in an ironic turnaround, Iraq brought regime
change to the US".
On the day after the
election the president, stripped of his majorities
in Congress, came forward to offer a still more
modest definition: victory would mean producing in
Iraq "a government that can defend, govern and
sustain itself". In fact, even these modest words
have come to seem ambitious, and perhaps
unrealistic. As I write, Operation Together
Forward, the joint effort by American and Iraqi
forces to secure the city of Baghdad, has failed.
The American commander in the capital, faced with
a 26% increase in attacks during the operation,
declared the results "disappointing", an
on-the-record use of direct language that a year
ago would have been inconceivable coming from a
senior US officer.
Operation Together
Forward was not only to have demonstrated that the
Iraqis were now "able to defend themselves", as
the president said, but to have made it possible
for "the unity government to make the difficult
decisions necessary to unite the country". The
operation was intended to blunt the power of Sunni
insurgents and thus clear the way for Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki to lend his support to
disarming and eliminating the Shi'ite militias
that are responsible for much of the death-squad
killing in Baghdad. Unfortunately, the militias -
in particular, the Mehdi Army and the Badr
Organization - remain a vital part of the unity
government's political infrastructure. This
inconvenient but fundamental political fact
renders much of the Bush administration's rhetoric
about its present strategy in Iraq almost
nonsensical.
The evident contradiction
between policy and reality, and the angry
reactions by Maliki to efforts by the US military
to rein in the militias by launching raids into
Sadr City, have stirred rumors, in Baghdad and
Washington, of a possible post-election coup
d'etat to replace Maliki with a "government of
national salvation". It is hard to know what such
a government, whether led by Iyad Allawi, a
longtime Washington favorite who was briefly
interim prime minister (and who derided the
possibility of coming to power by a coup), or some
other "strongman", might accomplish, or whether
any gains in security could outweigh the political
costs of conniving in the overthrow of a
government that, however ineffectual it is, Iraqis
elected. The establishment of that government
stands ever more starkly as one of the few (if
ambiguous) accomplishments remaining from the
original program for Iraq.
To Americans,
the Iraq war seems to have entered its third and
final act. Though the plans and ideas now will
come apace, all of them directed toward answering
a single, dominant question - How do we get out of
Iraq? - none is likely to supply a means of
departure that does not carry a very high cost.
The present "sense of an ending" about Iraq has
its roots more in American weariness and
frustration than any real prospect of finding a
"solution" or "exit strategy" that won't, in its
consequences, be seen for what it is: a de facto
acknowledgment of a failed and even catastrophic
policy.
Only the week before the election,
Bush warned an interviewer about the consequences
of an American defeat in Iraq:
The terrorists ... have clearly said
they want a safe haven from which to launch
attacks against America, a safe haven from which
to topple moderate governments in the Middle
East, a safe haven from which to spread their
jihadist point of view, which is that there are
no freedoms in the world; we will dictate to you
how you think ... I can conceivably see a world
in which radicals and extremists control oil.
And they would say to the West: You either
abandon Israel, for example, or we're going to
run the price of oil up. Or withdraw ...
A few days after the Republican
defeat at the polls, the president's chief of
staff, Josh Bolten, discussing the Iraqi
government, put the matter in even starker terms:
We need to treat them as a sovereign
government. But we also need to give them the
support they need to succeed because the
alternative for the
